Christopher Sunset

Poetry as a complete reinvention of the known world, converting acts of attention into rituals of quietly unfolding spectacle.

Bearing the visionary inheritance of ancient Chinese poets and early 20th century painters, Geoffrey Nutter casts a penetrating light into the colorfully shifting landscapes of modern existence. Christopher Sunset is a “correct and masterly play of forms in light,” reinvigorating the architecture of society’s captive and captivating imagination.

Winner of the 2011 Sheila Motton Book Award

Christopher Sunset gives its readers many reasons to read and reread, especially those readers who glory in the imagination’s ability to enrich the phenomenal world. Dan Chelotti, The Kenyon Review

A keen-eyed guide, Nutter has a gift for logging details as he trips out his long sentences in clipped lines. A confidential tone and intriguing observations hook you. The flotsam cataloged in “Electricity” is all too real. But “Broken shells, tire treads, rusted aluminum pull-tabs” are a foil for Nutter’s slight of hand. Patterns emerge. Upriver, the “embers of the bridge” become an enchanted “chorus of embers.” Jeffrey Cyphers Wright, The Brooklyn Rail

Mr. Nutter is one of those rare poets who, like John Ash or Pablo Neruda, is possessed of a genius that simultaneously opens out towards a field of mystical imagery—laden with the possibility of transcendence—while remaining firmly grounded in the matter-of-fact, stubborn currency of the everyday, the here-and-now. Harold Graves, Harold’s Sketchbook

These are generous poems, full of the impulse both to pay attention to things as they are and to allow them to become whatever other things their deeper selves contain or lead to. It is, again, the sort of generosity that comes to most of us in dreams where we too, as in this book’s final echo of the Song of Songs, might say, “I sleep ... but my heart is awake” Kate Angus, Coldfront

Thank goodness for Geoffrey Nutter, whose poetry seems to be powered equally by sunlight, virtue, wonder, and humility. Christopher Sunset immediately signals to the reader that its core values reside in the art and practice of being human. Time and again, Nutter’s finely crafted lines and sentences unerringly execute a clean delineation of subject or object. With deft breaks and descriptions, and with a steady commitment to the possibilities of the human psyche (rather than its limitations), Nutter is able to create an enlivening sense of hope as he embodies poetic principles that begin in quiet understanding and lead to praise. Nate Pritts, Rain Taxi

Geoffrey Nutter is the author of A Summer Evening (winner of the 2001 Colorado Prize), Water’s Leaves & Other Poems (Winner of the 2004 Verse Press Prize), Christopher Sunset (winner of the 2011 Sheila Motton Book Award), The Rose of January(Wave Books, 2013), and Cities at Dawn (Wave Books, 2016). He has taught poetry at Princeton, Columbia, University of Iowa, NYU, and the New School, and currently teaches Greek and Latin Classics at Queens College. He runs the Wallson Glass Poetry Seminars in New York City.